Washington's General (44 page)

If victory mattered to him, and it clearly did, it has not mattered to history. Nathanael Greene's name became linked not to a battle but, fittingly, to an idea, to a new method of warfare. “We fight, get beat, rise
and fight again,” he wrote. In doing so, time and again, he won, and he won at a time when all might have been lost.

General and Mrs. Greene were the toasts of Charleston and the nation in the winter of 1782-83. Congress voted him another resolution of thanks and appreciation. Parties and balls were held in their honor and in honor of imminent victory. On February 6, 1783, as peace negotiators in Europe finished their deliberations, Greene's hero, mentor, and commander in chief, George Washington, dispatched a letter to the commander of the Southern Department: “It is with pleasure [that] I congratulate you on the glorious end you have put to hostilities in the Southern States. The honor and advantages of it, I hope & trust, you will live long to enjoy.”

On April 11, eight years after shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, Congress declared an end to the war. It was time for Nathanael Greene and his troops to go home and rebuild their lives. As he prepared for his return to Rhode Island, he replied to Washington's message with a heartfelt tribute to the man who had seen in the young and inexperienced fallen Quaker a military leader of promise and talent. Washington had not cared about Greene's limp, which had so mortified his fellow Rhode Island militiamen. He did not judge him unfit for command because he lacked a formal education in military science, or anything else for that matter. He had turned to Greene in moments of desperation, when the army's supply system collapsed during Valley Forge, and when the southern army collapsed in late 1780. Though not given to sentiment and emotion, Washington revealed through his actions his affection and respect for the energetic amateur from Rhode Island. Greene embraced the man who had been not just his commander in chief but also a father figure to him after he rejected the religion and aspirations of Nathanael Greene Sr. “Every ear feels and every tongue confesses the merit and importance of your services,” he told Washington. “The polite Attention which I have experienced since I have had
the honor to serve under your Command claims my particular acknowledgments, and I feel a singular satisfaction, in having preserved your Confidence and esteem [through] the whole progress of the War, notwithstanding many jarring interests.”

General Greene dismissed his men on June 21, in a moving and eloquent salute that suited the occasion.

We have trod the paths of adversity together, and have felt the sunshine of better fortune. We found a people overwhelmed with distress, and a country groaning under oppression. It has been our happiness to relieve them. . . . Your generous confidence, amidst surrounding difficulties; your persevering tempers, against the tide of misfortune, paved the way to success. . . .

It is unnecessary, and might be deemed improper on this occasion, to enumerate the many trying scenes we have passed, of the suffering you have sustained. It is sufficient for the General that they have now subsided. It is his happiness that he has had the honor to command an army no less distinguished for its patience than bravery. . . .

United by principle and cemented by affection, you have exhibited to the world a proof that elevated souls and persevering tempers will triumph over every difficulty. The orders of government now separate us, perhaps forever. Our great object is answered; our first wish obtained. The same considerations which led us to the field, will now call upon us to retire. In whatever situation the General may be placed, it will afford him the highest pleasure to promote your interests; and it is among the first of his wishes to see you as happy as you have rendered millions of others.

He left Charleston on August 11, accompanied not by Caty–who was pregnant again and already well on her way home–but by several aides. Although he was eager to see his children in Rhode Island, he took
his time, looking up friends along the way and soaking up tributes to himself in Wilmington, North Carolina; Richmond, Virginia; Baltimore, Maryland; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He crossed the Delaware into Trenton, the site of that desperate, glorious gamble so many years ago, and was briefly reunited with Washington, in the home of a mutual friend. They had first met on the hills overlooking Boston in the summer of 1775, when neither man, nor anybody else, could imagine what the future might hold. They had suffered together, despaired together, and now they were triumphant together.

And together, in victory, they glimpsed the problems that awaited their infant nation. From Trenton, Washington and Greene traveled to Princeton, where Congress was meeting in exile after fleeing the capital once again. This time the threatening army was not British but American: hundreds of soldiers, most from the perpetually disgruntled Pennsylvania regiments, had marched on Philadelphia to demand back pay. When Pennsylvania's state government declined to protect Congress, delegates chose discretion over valor and crossed the Delaware to be closer to Washington and the troops he had brought with him from Newburgh, New York.

Although both Washington and Greene understood the plight of men who had suffered in service to the Revolution, neither sympathized with troops who wished to use or threaten force against civil leaders. Washington had quashed a near mutiny of officers in Newburgh in March, and Greene himself had negotiated his way out of several near or small mutinies in the spring of 1783. The Princeton exile reminded both men that even though the war was over, peace would bring little respite from confict, particularly in matters of money.

More uplifting were the expressions of gratitude that the embattled Congress offered to the South's liberator. The lawmakers voted to present Greene with two brass cannon to commemorate his southern campaign, although it was left to Washington to ask Greene where, exactly, Congress might find two brass cannon.

Greene formally requested that Congress accept his resignation as major general, and asked that he be allowed to go home to Rhode Island.
His military career was over. Congress allowed him to proceed to Rhode Island as a civilian.

Nathanael Greene was not at Fraunces Tavern on that night in December 1783 when George Washington said farewell to some of the men who served him for so long. Greene, eager to see Caty and the children, already was home.

He had left Rhode Island in 1775 to fight for a new nation. After a brief reunion with his family, he would soon leave home again, this time to build a new life.

Through the long years of conflict and hardship, Nathanael Greene yearned for his return to civilian life and the pleasures of what he invariably called “domestic felicity.” Now, at last, he was a civilian again; what's more, he had the fame he had been seeking ever since joining the Kentish Guards in 1774.

He had every right to be satisfied and joyous. The cause he had served so well for so long had ended in a spectacular triumph, one he had helped mightily to achieve. Through talent and determination–not family and heredity–he had made himself a part of history. He had helped defeat a great empire and now would play his part in building a new nation.

Just as important, he was free to introduce himself to the four children born during his absence, to enjoy the constant company of Caty, and to await the birth of their new baby. Years later, their daughter Cornelia recalled these memorable days when the Greene children got to know this stranger who was their father. Although used to command and
discipline, Nathanael Greene easily made the transition to doting and forgiving parent. “He was our boon companion and playfellow,” Cornelia wrote, “who winked at every atrocity we perpetrated.” The Greene family happily established itself in Newport, with the old house in Coventry handed over to Nathanael's brother Jacob.

Still, Nathanael Greene was not at peace. Disillusion, the inevitable residue of revolution, already had left its mark, even before he left the South. He had urged the South's politicians to approve a 5 percent tax on trade to help pay off the new nation's enormous debt. Congress, which did not have the power to tax, could only urge each state to implement the levy. Ever the nationalist in a region that would champion the notion of states' rights, Greene saw the tax as an obligation to be shared equally by all in the name of the new nation. He told the governor of Georgia, Lyman Hall, that the “united efforts of a free people may accomplish great things; but the endeavors of a few will be weak and [ineffective].”

His arguments, however, failed miserably. Georgia did not approve the tax, and South Carolina withdrew its initial support for the plan. Even more embarrassing for Greene, Rhode Island followed suit after he returned, rejecting the measure to the despair of its most famous native son. Greene was appalled as individual states acted as if they were sovereign countries and not part of a united enterprise. He told Washington of his fears for the future: “Many people secretly wish that every State should be completely independent, and that, as soon as our public debts are liquidated, Congress should be no more–a plan that would be as fatal to our happiness at home as it would be ruinous to our interest abroad.”

His own financial affairs were in shambles. The family business was in the hands of his brothers, and his secret wartime investment with Barnabas Deane was about to reach an unhappy end, with the company disbanding and Greene collecting nine hundred and sixty pounds sterling for his investment of ten thousand pounds in 1779. Worse yet, he was entangled in yet another complex arrangement that carried an odor of private dealing at public expense. Several months before he rode in triumph from Charleston to Newport, Greene had cosigned a loan to a
company that provided his army with one of its final consignments of desperately needed supplies. John Banks, one of the company's principals, was friendly with two of Greene's aides, both of whom secretly became partners with Banks. When the firm, Hunter, Banks & Company, defaulted on the loan Greene had guaranteed, there were whispered accusations that Greene himself was a silent partner with Banks. The evidence suggests that he was not, and Banks offered a testimonial to Greene's innocence, but the suspicions prompted Congress to delay paying Banks's creditors. The creditors, in turn, dunned Greene for the thirty thousand pounds due them from Hunter, Banks.

“I tremble at my own situation when I think of the enormous sums I owe,” Greene told his wife. “I seem to be doomed to a life of slavery.”

And so, in a desperate attempt to pay off his debts and avoid the life to which he thought he was doomed, he turned to slavery itself.

In principle, Nathanael Greene, like many raised in Quaker traditions, opposed slavery. He told an audience in Philadelphia in 1783, “Nothing can be said in [slavery's] defense.” But even as he spoke those words, Greene already was in the business of buying human beings and had found a way to justify it. Slaves, he told that same audience in Philadelphia, were “as much attached to a plantation as a man is to his family.”

He put that terrible justification into practice on the plantation he received from South Carolina. The land and its slaves were once owned by the state's royal governor, Thomas Boone, but the new patriot government had confiscated Boone's property. Greene wanted to buy the slaves who had worked the plantation under Boone, and he convinced himself that somehow this was a humane thing to do. He told his Philadelphia audience that the slaves would “not be worse but better” under his ownership.

He also believed he had no choice. If he were to become the rich and influential person he wished to be in postwar America, he first had to clear himself of debt. Turning his gifts of southern land into profitable plantations would help him achieve that goal. He decided he could not do that, however, without using slave labor.

But slaves were expensive, and Greene didn't have a great deal of cash. He told the Speaker of South Carolina's House of Representatives, “[It will be] entirely out of my power” to buy the slaves who had worked the Boone property “unless the State will make the conditions for pay favorable to my wishes.” He apologized for making such a request, explaining that he had “a dependant family and children to educate.” The state and Greene eventually came to terms.

He had similar plans for the estate he received from Georgia, Mulberry Grove outside Savannah, which was to become his new home. Not long after his return to Rhode Island, Greene told Robert Morris, the new nation's superintendent of finance, “I find I can get my Georgia plantation stocked with good Gangs of Negroes at about £70 a head and the payments made mostly by installment.” Greene borrowed money from Morris and from his friend and former commissary general Jeremiah Wadsworth to buy slaves and equipment for the estate. He betrayed no sense that his conscience was troubled as he made the transition from Yankee businessman to slave-owning southern plantation owner, although he later wrote of his wish for the “demolishing” of slavery and an end to the slave trade.

The months following Greene's return to civilian life offered a hint of the role he seemed destined to play in the new nation's government. In March 1784, Congress appointed him to a commission formed to negotiate “Treaties with the different Nations and Tribes of Indians.” Ironically, Greene learned of his appointment through a letter from his old antagonist and fellow fallen Quaker Thomas Mifflin, now the president of Congress. He turned down the appointment, not out of any personal resentment but because Caty was recovering slowly after giving birth to their fifth child, Louisa.

The urgency of family and business concerns, however, was no match for personal appeals from Greene's former commander in chief. When Washington asked him, in late March 1784, to travel to Philadelphia for the first meeting of the Society of the Cincinnati, Greene put aside every-thing
else for the sake of his friend and hero. The society was made up of former officers of the Continental army and was designed to “perpetuate” the friendships forged during the war and to celebrate the Revolution's ideals. Washington served as its president, but his presence did not shield the organization from complaints that it reeked of Old World, antirepublican privilege: critics, including Benjamin Franklin and the Adams cousins, were appalled that membership in the exclusive club could be passed down to the eldest sons of members. Washington fairly begged Greene to play an active role in the society, telling him that he wanted “the best abilities of the Society” at its initial meeting. “I cannot avoid expressing an earnest wish that yours may be among them,” he added. Greene did not let down Washington but was shocked to discover, as he told Washington, that “the current of public prejudice is directed against the Cincinnati.”